


Surprise Surprise

by theleaveswant



Category: Flashpoint, Hard Core Logo (1996), Slings & Arrows
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Fluff, Menstruation, Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-08
Updated: 2011-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:39:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/theleaveswant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a strange and intrusive question, but Joe's theatre friends are strange and intrusive people, and Jules is too distracted by her instinctive answer to the question to take offense at its asking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surprise Surprise

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a hidden prompting meme (author has a secret list of X number of characters, people comment asking questions like "what was 6's first date with 7 and 8 like?"), prompt was "5 and 6 have been dating for a long time (let's say about 5 years). Is there anything about each other than still surprises them?"
> 
> Takes place in the universe where Jules was an undergrad at U of A, working as a bouncer at the club the night of Hard Core Logo's last show, and caught Joe fleeing the scene of his own suicide, rather less dead than advertised. Apparently some time after that they become friends and eventually cohabit? Even though she is a cop-daughter-of-cop and he is a fraud-committing anarchist.

It's a strange and intrusive question, but Joe's theatre friends are strange and intrusive people, and Jules is too distracted by her instinctive answer to the question to take offense at its asking. Yes, even after dating for five years and knowing each other, on and off, for almost ten, there are things that surprise her about Joe, but honestly what's most surprising is discovering _what_ is surprising. Facts aren't surprising, not really, not often; feelings, reactions, glimpses of thought processes . . . those can sneak up on you.

For example, Joe's whispered confession when they went to the petting zoo at the Royal Winter Fair that he drank the blood of a slaughtered goat while on acid, a few days before he killed himself and met her, didn't really surprise her. That's where he was then. Even the postscript he added later, while they were waiting for tiny donuts, that Pipe had dismembered the trapped creature with a chainsaw, wasn't much of a shocker. The surprise came weeks later, when Jules' period started _while_ Joe was going down on her, and he freaked out and had to run to the bathroom to wash his mouth, and then when he came back into the room to face her wrath and explained that it wasn't because of some bullshit macho fear of pollution by the cooties of her womynly lyfe magyck. It was because blood reminded him of the goat.

Jules is pretty sure she surprises him, too. There was the time when another one of these theatre friends managed to wrangle them comp tickets to see Geoffrey Tennant's return to the Swan, this time directing the play that reputedly drove him mad, when Jules revealed to Joe that not only had she seen Tennant's _Hamlet_ seven years ago, she was there the night of his infamous last performance, volunteering as an usher at the festival her first summer in Ontario. Joe joked that he ought to accompany her to more arts events in future, given her evident talent for finding pop culture history as it's made. Jules had laughed and shrugged it off, said that it only seemed to work when she was unescorted, and then Joe looked at her cockeyed for a long time, until she was just about to tweak his nipple for being weird, before wrapping his arms around her. “It's okay,” he murmured into her temple. “It's not your fault. And if what you said's true, I'll do what I can to make it not happen again.”

The thing that surprises her most, though, with the way it keeps on surprising her, is how warm she feels inside, every single time they lock eyes.


End file.
